Some years ago I published a novel, A World Between, about how a malevolent consciousness shaped by isolation and grievance threatened the fabric of reality. It was science fiction. A metaphor.

But in a reality unrecognizable from that of just a few years ago, it no longer feels abstract.

We are living in a time in which a warped consciousness — narcissistic, anti-intellectual, vengeful, and untethered from fact — has degraded institutions, debased norms, and damaged the material conditions of people’s lives, especially the most vulnerable, shattering our prior reality.

What has been remarkable about Trump’s reign is how deep and wide that corrosion has been. By violating norms faster than institutions could respond, he revealed how much of our reality is maintained not by formal authority but by collective consensus, and how dependent that maintenance is on people of good faith occupying positions of power. Once that consensus weakens, reality becomes negotiable.

Long before Trump’s ascent, the country had accumulated unresolved damage that laid the groundwork for upheaval: wars conducted under false pretenses without clarity or conclusion; grotesque…